Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Did CA Tip the Scales Against LOS? Is The End Near?

There are three little words that will make any livable streets advocate groan: Level of Service.

"Level of Service" is the metric that, perhaps more than any other, fuels the decimation of walkable streets.

Level of Service, simply put, is a measure of vehicle congestion at
intersections. Projects are graded from “A” to “F” based on how much
delay drivers experience.

That’s all it measures: the free motion of motor vehicles. And that’s
the problem. The safety of people on foot and on bikes doesn’t enter
into the equation at all, and transit vehicles carrying dozens of people
are subjugated to the movement of private cars. In fact, a high “level
of service” generally makes for a much more stressful and dangerous
street, since speeding traffic, and the wide lanes that facilitate it,
is a leading cause of traffic injuries and deaths.

California isn’t the only place rethinking its reliance on Level of
Service to grade transportation and development projects. Portland,
Oregon, issued an RFP last summer
asking for help developing new performance measures to replace Level of
Service. The RFP read: “The existing LOS standards and measures, which
focus only on motor vehicle levels of service, do not reflect the City
of Portland’s current practice which emphasizes and promotes a
multi-modal approach to transportation planning and providing
transportation services.”

Meanwhile, other cities that want to build better streets for
walking, biking, and transit are finding ways around Level of Service
without changing laws.

Rachel Weinberger helped write Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability
framework. Level of Service requirements presented a barrier to safer
street designs there, too, but by testing out new engineering approaches
as pilot projects, reforms could be advanced without hacking through
too much red tape. Internally, the city used performance measures that
prioritized goals it considered more important than vehicle Level of
Service, such as spatial efficiency.

“A lot of places are trying to rethink it,” said Weinberger, who is
now director of research and policy strategy at Nelson\Nygaard. “People
are starting to say, ‘We’ve been using this performance measure and
we’re not getting the whole picture, and we’re not getting the result we
really want.’”

The state of Florida, for example, uses a multi-modal Level of Service analysis. The state of Virginia is considering something similar, said Weinberger.

Another innovator is Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte first
adopted a soft approach to its use of Level of Service about 10 years
ago, when the city passed its complete streets policy, says Dan
Gallagher, the city’s transportation and planning manager.

“We realized if we were going to be a city that could move cars but
also be accommodating for bikes, pedestrians and transit users, a strict
level of service approach probably wasn’t going to be the best thing,”
Gallagher said. “What we’ve moved to is more of a comprehensive look at
our improvements.”

Charlotte still uses Level of Service in its planning, but in
combination with metrics that measure “Level of Service” for cyclists
and pedestrians as well. Multi-modal Level of Service measures have been pioneered by groups like the National Cooperative Highway Research program.

The
use of "Level of Service" performance metrics can lead to road
widenings that entrench dependence on driving and jeopardize
pedestrians.

The city of Seattle is another conscientious objector. Michael James,
a project manager at the Seattle Department of Transportation, said the
city is considering whether to adopt a multi-modal Level of Service in
its next comprehensive plan.

“We’re really trying to move away from using level of service because
it really just focuses on driver access and it’s more of a measure of
driver convenience than anything else,” James said. “We still do use LOS
at intersections, but primarily to make sure our transit is still
moving.”

Of course, for every state or local agency that eschews
transportation decisions based primarily on Level of Service, there are
many more that use it to quash projects that might be beneficial for
pedestrians and cyclists. The sad thing, according to Gary Toth at Project for Public Spaces,
is that there is absolutely no requirement for states and cities to do
so. Adherence to Level of Service is simply a convention that survives
from the bygone era of highway building. Even with the advances in
multi-modal Level of Service, many communities will forgo this measure
because the data needed to calculate is more difficult to obtain.